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When does "criticism" of the current military action in Iran (and by criticism I mean a variety of behaviors from our political leadership to randoms on the internet) become "treason" (both in the firm prosecutable sort and the "historically your neighbors would have stopped talking to you or maybe chased you out of town" sort)?
I get it, people are mad at Trump, Republicans, America, the Jews, Israel, whatever.
I get it.
Many people would rather have had us not get here. But we are here. The ship has sailed.
If everyone returns to their corners now at the very least we have billions of dollars in economic dysfunction, realistically we have tremendous destabilization in the region which is going cause the biggest problems we've seen in decades. In truth, we call it all off now, Iran will probably finish arming themselves and nuke a civilian population, likely Israel. Even the most anti-semitic person who ever lived should be able to understand how bad doing that could go. It would likely be the worst thing that's ever happened just from the resulting chaos.
So we are stuck.
But you see a lot of people with an agenda trying to defang the war effort or get it cancelled or whatever. Many probably don't expect it to happen, they are just trying to set up Trump looking bad. An example of this is probably the war powers resolutions.
But at that point you have overt politicking putting American, Israeli, Middle Eastern lives (and maybe everyone else?) at risk because you want to slightly increase the chance you can spend two years repeatedly impeaching Trump.
I think that's kind of treasonous? Maybe not the executing kind, but definitely the "holy shit what are you doing kind."
Like the war. Hate the war. It's happened. Criticizing how we got here is understandable, but I think we need to be careful.
Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.
If the war is called off now, the IRGC will press to finish developing nuclear weapons, engage in an extraordinary program of domestic repression and ultimately emerge as the much firmer, more cemented, and even more indisputable ruling elite of Iran. Will they nuke Israel after a cessation of hostilities? I doubt it. If there is a nuclear attack it will happen during a long war of at least several months, probably a rough or dirty bomb using the current 60% enriched material, put together quickly over a month, smuggled into Israel, Dubai, or somewhere else by an IRGC remnant unit operating under limited central authority. Someone like Pezeshkian wouldn’t even know about it until it happened.
The problem is, all of that might happen anyway, underscoring what a poor decision this war has been so far. As I said, there was only one chance to do this and it would have been while 2m+ Iranians were protesting, take out the leadership, police stations, basij, IRGC hubs, then hope that the institutions get overwhelmed with the sheer mass of human movement before anyone regroups, and then bring in US forces to ‘defend’ the (counter)revolution either overtly or quietly. Doing it after all the most aggressive / low inhibition protestors have been killed is pointless, a bunch of scared middle class people in Tehran are now supposed to, what, message each other on Telegram and try to storm parliament, when there are 800,000 soldiers, some who care and some who don’t, and 150,000 deeply ideologically committed IRGC fighters out to avenge their spiritual leader?
Trump could offer a Palestinian State and the expulsion of the Jews from the West Bank in exchange for significant compromise on Iran's nuclear capabilities and tech.
No nuclear enrichment, lift sanctions, Palestinian state, expel the Jews from the West Bank and make the West Bank part of Palestine. No Israeli presence in Syria.
The real problem is the only sane offramps would go against Israel, we aren't actually in an unresolvable situation, it only seems there's no offramp because we aren't allowed to compromise the interests of Israel for the interests of America and the rest of the world.
Would Iran also have to publically dismantle its Doomsday Countdown Clock?
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